Cold and Unfeeling
by mimirshead
Summary: Stein wrestles with his inability to empathize, and the thought that this may make him seem cold, and unfeeling. Rated T for safety.


Cold and unfeeling. The thought struck him as odd, stopping him in place. He stared at the girl, eyes wide, and unfocused by confusion.  
Cold. Unfeeling. He'd never been either of those things. Sure he was more focused on the gathering of knowledge, and the exploration of things he was interested in than he was the feelings of people who stood in his path but he wasn't cold. And it's not as if he didn't feel things. He felt a good amount of things. A wide verity of emotions, sometimes, he even felt more than one emotion at a time, or felt emotions that he couldn't put names to, because he couldn't see them in others as a clear cut set of actions that he was able to emulate.

He felt things.

He opened his mouth to tell the girl she was wrong, but she walked away, angry. Distraught. Stein understood distraught because he could see it very clearly. He imagined what he was feeling then was also something along the lines of distraught.

The walk home was full of introspection. Self questioning, and fear. Anxiety he supposed covered it. He had a lot of trouble with emotive words. He felt a great many things, but the words for them were always… lost in a the muddle of what it could all possibly mean. He understood the simple ones. The rest… He was still learning the rest.

Spirit was teaching him though, and Spirit would know the answer. It was a question he could not fully answer for himself without giving a biased, and therefore useless answer.

"Well, yeah. Kind of."

Stein stopped, eyebrows tugging up in the center. What he was feeling was confusion. He didn't understand where Spirit would get that feeling.

"How so?" he asked, and Spirit flinched. Uncomfortable. Stein was getting pretty good at the game. He'd been playing it all his life. Still, he recognized other people's feeling better than his own. As always.

"Well you tend not to care about other people."

Stein frowned again. That was a fallacy. He cared about Spirit an awful lot.

"I supposed I was good at pretending."

"Not really."

His face must have looked wretched from the way he'd scrunched it by now. Cold, and unfeeling. He definitely wasn't that. He was feeling a good deal more than one emotion, and it was confusing. Confused. That was one of them. Upset. Distress was a possibility.

"It just tends to seem like you're mocking everyone when you try to be compassionate."

"Does it seem like that when I try to show concern for you?"

"Well," Spirit paused. "Yeah."

Stein made a chuffing noise between his teeth. That was the worst possible answer. The look on Spirit's face had gone from uncomfortable to intrigued.

"Why?" he asked. "Do you care?"

"No. Obviously not. I'm "cold, and unfeeling"."

Spirit gave him an unimpressed look. "I'd never really pegged you as the type for sarcasm," he said. Stein sneered at him.

"You know that's probably a lot more emotion than you've shown in the whole four years we've been partners."  
Stein threw his arms up in the air, and turned away. "You clearly haven't been paying attention then!" he yelled. "And just forget about this conversation! It was stupid anyway."

He spent the rest of the evening thinking about it. Wondering about it. About how Spirit had gotten the feeling that he didn't care. He was just awkward. Awkward was the right word for it. It was hard not to be awkward when you couldn't empathize with others. He couldn't identify his feelings like the "normal people" could.

When he went to bed, he laid there for a while, staring at the ceiling, wondering if Spirit would follow him up. A knock about twenty minutes latter laid the wonderment to rest, and hailed Spirit's entrance to the room.

"Was that your way of saying you cared about me?" he asked, leaving the door open so that there was light, and sitting down in a chair across from the bed.

Stein grumbled at him. What he felt was annoyance. He didn't like the question, because as he had currently deduced, it was entirely possible that he was indeed cold, and unfeeling. That his "emotions" were fabrications to help him fit in better with society. Lies he'd sold to himself so well that he now saw them as fact.

"Because I think it was," Spirit continued.

Stein groaned again, and hid his face under the pillow.

"I'm sorry," Spirit said. "I won't get mad at you for trying to care anymore."

Stein peaked out at him. Spirit was feeling remorse. Seeing the remorse on Spirit's face made him feel bad. Some unnamable emotion churning in his gut that made him feel ill.

"I'm not cold, and unfeeling," he said, words muffled by the pillow. It made Spirit smile, which lightened the feeling in his gut. "I just don't feel things when other people feel things." he paused, glaring at the ceiling for a second. "Most of the time."

"Most of the time?"

"Your emotions make me have emotions," Stein said. Spirit's hand was warm when it fell on his wrist. Warm, and clammy from the heat. It should not have been a pleasant sensation. It was.

"I care about you too," Spirit said softly. Those words made him smile. Smiling equated to happiness. He supposed what he felt then was happiness.


End file.
